This Is How We Do It: ID Grad Biennial

Curatorial Statement:

“So, what exactly do you…do…”

Industrial design is a blurry discipline. It kind of has to be. Our role is to move in the spaces between disciplines, building connections and bridges between experts, users, stakeholders, factory workers, engineers, policy makers, titans of industry, middle managers, lost children…you get the idea. We’re all over the place. When we talk about design, we talk about objects and artifacts; services and experiences; systems and platforms; strategies and stories.

RISD’s MID community is especially blurry. The program is founded on a studio-based dialogue exploring ID in a cohort consisting of people with backgrounds from all over the world. We are former architects, sculptors, anthropologists, filmmakers, set designers, engineers, scientists, and more. We are building our own bridges between our past practices and our future place in the broad discipline of industrial design.

To help manage all of this blurriness, we use models—sometimes conceptual, sometimes physical—to help test our ideas and organize our thinking. This exhibit is the result a process that asked us to move between concepts and objects through a series of stages. Sometimes we worked alone. Sometimes we collaborated with our peers. In the end, we made some models. And then organized them according to another model.

This is how we do it.
 

Squirel Tails for Rats - Dave Pittman

Backpack - Jake Moritz